The Mother of All Acronymns (MAA)

I have a large number of posts to finish in my queue but this one can’t wait. Having just returned from the info360 show in DC last week my mind is overwhelmed with the buzzwords and acronyms. Sadly over the weekend the debate over the accuracy, relevance and relative deceptive nature of ECM reared its ugly head again and quickly spiraled into the same tired parsing and argument over semantic nuance. The last time this happened I ended up writing about 3000 words on the topic and I refuse to do that again. Today @mcboof is again railing against WEM and I predict before the day is done somebody will make the same arguments against WCM DAM and every other TLA related to our business – AGAIN.

As much as we like to debate and deride them – acronyms are useful. They are short hand time savers and very powerful communication tools. As the great philosopher Stan Lee once wrote though – with much power comes much responsibility. Human beings have a unique ability to ignore what they have been told and hear what they want to hear. It doesn’t matter how many times you explain something – if someone WANTS to believe an acronym stands for more or less than you think it should – you cannot argue them semantically out of that position because at the end of the day – an acronym is in the eye of the beholder.

So to simplify our lives I am offering for consideration a replacement for every acronym we use today. I offer to replace them with a single uber acronym. One that you can debate with equal ferocity and accomplish exactly the same thing. The principle advantage being that we can save time by saving our arguments and cutting and pasting them into the twitter stream unedited when the debate flares up again – regardless of topic. So here are the terms that add up to the 42 of acronyms with my explanations.

• Global – Enterprise is too small and universal is too big. Global is just right.

• Omibus -The legal definition of this word is “Having many purposes or treating with numerous things at the same time; including many things.”

• Operations – If you do anything with anything else it can be considered an operation so this can be applied without debate.

There you have it – The mother of all acronyms – GOO. We are all experts in GOO. GOO is in every company and government. Nothing happens without GOO. Even as I write this I am looking forward to the first GOO Conference. In three years or so some consultant will decide we need GOO 2.0.

If you need to talk to GOO – you do what make sense – you interact with it giving you appropriately: GOO-i

If users need to see your GOO to interact with it – you have ui-GOO-i

No need to thank me. I am just doing my part to make the world a better place.